The Unintended Industrial Policy Benefits of Covid-19 in Africa
Loading...
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Routledge
Abstract
This chapter examines a seemingly heretical subject matter, that is, the unintended benefcial
impact of the otherwise disruptive novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease it
causes code-named COVID-19 (e.g. Ssali 2020). First detected in Wuhan, China in December
2019, COVID-19 was declared a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”
on 30 January 2020 and reclassifed as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO 2020). That
COVID-19 knows no social, political, gender, or racial boundaries is no longer debatable
(WHO 2020). What has escaped scholarly scrutiny is the positive albeit the unintended
benefcial impacts of COVID-19 (Baldwin and Eiichi 2020). Are there verifable industrial
policy dividends of COVID-19?
This question is important for two distinctive reasons – one theoretical and the other
pragmatic. Theoretically, free-market fundamentalism – which has dominated national and
global political economies for 40 years – associates globalisation with the sovereignty of
private capital over sovereign states (Bhagwati 2004). Globalisation arguably signifes the
supremacy of economic liberalism over economic nationalism. It signifes the death of country-
specifc industrial policies that are theoretically faulted for undermining the market’s
allocative efciency and promoting patronage politics (Kelsall et al. 2010).
Description
Keywords
Industrial Policy Benefits, Covid-19, Africa
Citation
Kiiza, J. (2021). The unintended industrial policy benefits of COVID-19 in Africa. In Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa (pp. 645-657). Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003143840-66